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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c16.s2: 2. The Milindapañha

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c16.s2

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2. The Milindapañha

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The *Milindapañha* which is interesting for its strict adherence to the denial of any true soul (*jīva, puggala, vedagū*) incidentally insists on the separateness and necessity of the senses;¹ the alleged soul is repudiated precisely because it, in theory autonomous, can only use a specific sense to obtain the corresponding sense experience, while, if it were really autonomous, it could use any of the senses or dispense altogether with the use of any of the sense organs while in fact there can be no sense experience if the sense organ is removed, a contention which may conceivably have been directed against the contemporary Sāṃkhya school. The relation of sensation to the functions of mind is then investigated, the issue being whether sensation issues commands to ideation or ideation bids sensation to act. The question is quaint, and the answer negates either view; in place we have the explanation of the constant succession of the activity of mind on sense perception in inclination or natural tendency, as when rain water runs away down a slope; in existing structure as when in a walled city there is but one means of ingress and egress; in habitual process, as in the order followed by the wagons of a caravanserai; and in practice, as skill is gained in the arts of writing, arithmetic, and valuation.

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¹ Mil., pp. 55 f.; 86 f.; 57 ff.

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As regards cognition the ideas of initial and sustained mental application (vitakka, vicāra) are illustrated by similes pointing to the application of attention followed by the repeated pulsations of attention thus applied. The analysis of cognition is of importance in emphasizing the simultaneity of the elements involved; the contact, feeling, perception, conceived intention or volition (cetanā), initial and sustained attention, which are here united as supervening on the three factors—once reduced to two—of sense organ, object, and intelligence directed to the sense, are asserted to be simultaneous, the factors being capable of distinction but not experienced successively or in isolation any more than the flavours employed in the making of a sauce by the royal cook. Later analysis denied the simultaneity, substituting instead swift succession, doubtless in accord with the Nyāya view.²

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² Mil., pp. 62 f.; 56, 63. For the later view, see Ledi Sadaw, JPTS. 1914, p. 149, and cf. KV. ii. 7; xvi. 4.

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On the subject of higher knowledge an interesting development is made in the exposition of a series of types of minds, as a reply to the difficulty suggested by the fact that, though omniscient, the Buddha was not always consciously so, but had the power to know anything to which he might direct his attention. The seven stages are those of the ordinary sensual man; the man who has entered on the path to salvation; the man who has so far progressed that he has but one more life on earth to live before he will attain the end; the man who will attain the end in heaven; the Arahant or enlightened man; the Pacceka or individual Buddha who knows but does not preach enlightenment; and the omniscient Buddha, who is actually or potentially all-knowing. Insight again is discriminated from reasoned thinking (*yoniso manasikāra*) as elimination as opposed to mental grasp; the latter is ascribed to sheep, goats, oxen, buffaloes, camels, asses, but these representatives of animals are denied insight or intuition. Again, awareness is attributed to intelligence (*viññāṇa*), discernment to intuition (*paññā*), and among the results of intuition are placed as assured miracles like the power to move through the air, or travel in an instant to the Brahma-world, situated at four months’ journey of a falling body from the earth.¹

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¹ Mil., pp. 102 ff. ; 32, 39, 82.

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Mindfulness (*sati*) appears definitely here in one place as equivalent to memory, and the grounds of it are given as sixteen,² in a manner which exhibits no trace of any serious investigation. They are (1) extraordinary effort, as when former births are called to mind; (2) outward aid, that is, being reminded by others; (3) impression caused by importance of the occasion or pleasure; (4) impression made by pain; (5) similarity of appearance; (6) difference of appearance; (7) knowledge of speech which produces memory on being reminded by others; (8) a sign, e.g. a mark on a bullock; (9) effort to recollect on the prompting of others; (10) calculation, as in the knowledge acquired in writing that such and such a letter follows another; (11) arithmetic, as when accountants do big sums by their knowledge of figures; (12) learning by heart, as in the case of reciters of the scriptures; (13) meditation, as when a monk recollects a temporary earlier experience; (14) reference to a book, as to a law; (15) a pledge, as when a man recollects from seeing pledged goods the occasion; and (16) actual experience, as when one remembers what one has seen, heard, tasted, &c. There is, it is clear, practically no appreciation whatever of the nature of the problem.

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² Mil., pp. 78 ff. There are actually seventeen causes, which are to be reduced to sixteen. Cf. KV. i. 8; the Uttarāpathakas hold that mind in recalling is without object; ix. 6. For the Nyāya view. cf. NS. iii. 2. 44.

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There is also given out in a late chapter a theory of dreams, which describes six kinds of men who experience them, he who is of a bilious, windy or phlegmatic humour, he who is influenced by a god, he who habituates himself, and he who does so in the way of prognostication, the last sort only of dreams being true. The prognostication comes about not by the action of any person, god or man, but it enters the mind of the sleeper of itself, and is explained to him by one skilled in omens, just as such a person prognosticates from external signs such as pimples. Dreams take place in ‘monkey-sleep’, a state between waking and deep sleep. But the theory, naïve in its acceptance of popular belief in divine action and in the autonomy of prognostication, is interesting incidentally; it is explained that there is no dream in deep sleep for thought (citta) has then entered into, and become one with the Bhavaṅga, and in that state thought does not act, and, being inactive, it does not experience pleasure or pain, and dreaming is impossible in such a condition. The Bhavaṅga, or stream of being, is a conception barely known in the Abhidhamma, and there not explained, but it evidently has already here the sense of a continuum which is not conscious, but from which consciousness emerges, and which may therefore be reckoned as sub-conscious.¹

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¹ Mil., pp. 297 ff.; on Bhavaṅga, NP., p. 91; Tika-Paṭṭhāna, in Compendium, p. 267, n. 1; ADS. iii. 8. In AN. ii. 79 bhava appears with the other three aggregates, matter, feeling, ideation, covering perhaps consciousness and the dispositions. On the Nyāya view of dreams cf. ILA., pp. 66 f.

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Volition² receives little further explication. The term Cetanā is defined as having the characteristic of being conceived and the being prepared, but the terms are obscure; the illustrations of one who prepares and gives poison to others with the result that both suffer pain suggest that it denotes deliberate intention followed by effectual action. The doctrine also occurs that involuntary evil is more blameworthy than voluntary, as a man who intentionally seizes a mass of hot metal suffers less than he who does so unawares.

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² Mil., p. 61. Conation (viriya—indriya) is recognized in DS., § 13. On Cetanā cf. Compendium, pp. 235 ff.

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